Unisys Regains Top Spot Among Profusion TPC-C Benchmarks

Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com) continues to goose the performance of its eight-way servers based on the Intel Corp. Profusion chipset.

The Blue Bell, Pa.-based computer company was first to reveal results on a Profusion-based system in June, when it boasted 37,757.23 transactions per minute (TpmC) under the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-C benchmark for measuring Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance.

The early number on a Unisys Aquanta ES2085R was important to Intel in its goal of demonstrating that its long-awaited Profusion chipset could approach linear scalability over the performance of its established four-way chipset. Microsoft Corp. also promoted the result as evidence of the scalability of both Windows NT Server 4.0, Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server 7.0, Enterprise Edition.

The benchmark places Wintel in a competitive position against low-end RISC/Unix systems, especially on price.

Compaq Computer Corp. leapfrogged Unisys in September with results of 40,266.4 TpmC on its ProLiant 8000 and 40,368.75 on the ProLiant 8500.

On Oct. 12, Unisys took back the top TPC-C benchmark spot among Profusion systems. The company submitted a result to the TPC (www.tpc.org) that showed it had achieved 40,670.05 TpmC on a Unisys Aquanta ES5085R outfitted with eight 550-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors. The previous Unisys result was endowed with identical processors, meaning Unisys engineered the speed increase elsewhere in the system.

The Unisys system also slides in at a cost of $18.42/TpmC, shaving 4 cents off Compaq’s best result and $1.43 off of Unisys’ first posting.

IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. have yet to publish Profusion-based TPC-C results. Hitachi Data Systems, which pushed a Profusion-based system onto the market about nine months ahead of anybody else, also has yet to release a benchmark result.

Industry analysts have predicted that hardware OEMs will produce a round of benchmarks showing significant performance jumps on the Profusion systems when they begin running the tests on Windows 2000, then again when they use Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. -- Scott Bekker